The healthcare industry is undergoing transformational change with a massive drive for standardized communication systems, robust security, improved efficiency, and increased accountability. In addition to this, there have been major and rapid advances in medical sensing and mobile communications devices with advances in functionality coupled with improvements in portability (miniaturization and power efficiency). There have also been unprecedented advances in objective technologies across the board and specialties, especially in the areas of imaging and laboratory analysis.
While such advances have been going on, this technical culture has effectively neglected the most important reason for medical presentation and intervention, i.e., the stories as told by the patients. Indeed, clinical professors universally reinforce the importance of patient history in medical monitoring and diagnosis. Medical history is acknowledged by most healthcare professionals to supersede the importance of examination, imaging, and laboratory investigations. Without an accurate recall and transcription of events, the accuracy of medical diagnosis can be critically compromised. For example, an individual who is breathing with difficulty, and is red and blotchy and cannot remember eating a peanut thirty minutes earlier, will compromise a physician's diagnosis of a nut allergy and may lead to the individual not avoiding nuts and having the same potentially life-threatening problem in the future.
In addition, physicians rely on patient feedback on efficacy of interventions, reporting of adverse effects, and progression of disease. Due to treatment and individual variability (resulting from a myriad of factors including genetics, nutrition, lifestyle, and history), the response to any one intervention is variable and, thus, feedback is extremely important. For the treating physician, monitoring this response occurs mainly at the post-prescription appointment. This can be problematic because there can be a significant delay or error in reporting adverse effects, or lack of efficacy, due to elapsed time between appointments, thereby resulting in decreased likelihood of an accurate recall of events.
This reliance on “the individual's story” is of significant importance because it likely relates directly to the problem that precipitated the person's visit to the health care provider. There are, however, problems with this reliance on doctor/patient communication, as human memory is fallible, and there can be variable delays between reporting and the actual time of the course of events leading up to the appointment. It is well established that recall of events can be inaccurate, and this is even more of an issue in certain medical conditions, such as a head injury. As well as memory, bias at the time of any professional consultation due to literacy, general communication skills, language barriers, cultural barriers, ethnic barriers, and socioeconomic barriers also impede effective communications between individuals and their medical healthcare providers.
In addition to the above, there are potentially multiple transcription errors at the healthcare provider level from other factors including preconception, leading and closing questioning, time pressure, and general misunderstanding. There is fallibility of conventional healthcare provider/patient communications.
Some tools have been developed to address the foregoing foreseen deficiencies in the current healthcare paradigm, but they generally require a reasonably high degree of literacy to make full use of such tools. Exemplary tools are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,529,195 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,315, each of which is incorporated herein by reference for disclosure of such tools. For example, body image mapping has been used for tracking pain; and pictorial charts have been used for depicting symptoms to identify infections or asthma.
Nonetheless, it is believed that no one has used representations of symptoms in an on-screen format that actually depict how the symptoms feel; enable the assignment to symptoms of values (including binary values, ranges, measures, and intensities); and/or associated the symptoms with time thereof and/or special (geographical) location thereof; and then entered such data into electronic health records for the purposes of clinical decision making.
One or more of these unique benefits and advantages are provided in accordance with one or more aspects and features of the present invention. Indeed, it is believed that one or more aspects and features address current limitations in the widespread usability of technologies, including: user input, which generally requires some knowledge of how to use the technologies with keyboard entry; instructions and guidance, which utilizes written text, thus failing to be usable by those with disabilities or language difficulties; and the lack of decision making based on patient stories being built into current clinical decision making applications.
As will be appreciated from the disclosure below, one or more aspects and features of the invention solves problems of communicating, translating and transcribing. This especially applies to those persons who are otherwise limited in the way they can communicate using language, ether verbal or written/typed. Indeed, many aspects and features of the invention are patient-centric and empower individuals, and populations of individuals, in communicating their stories, giving voice to their experiences of symptoms over time and enhancing medical decision making based thereon.